The key to storing hydrogen?

As we all know, processes which will improve the 'greenness' of the Earth are becoming more and more important in the chemistry industry. Some UK scientists have now developed an electrolysis system which is able to split up water as it oxidises water into oxygen.

So how exactly is this 'green'? Well, normally in electrolysis like this, the hydrogen would be released as hydrogen gas just as the oxygen is released in it's diatomic form. However, scientists in Glasgow have found that using a phosphomolybdate anion, the hydrogen ions are able to be stored. This means that the next step in the electrolysis can be postponed until whenever! This could act as a renewable energy store for hydrogen fuel made by water electrolysis. The idea was to try to reverse the electrolysis process, giving pure hydrogen rather than pure oxygen. If this is developed then this could crack the renewable energy problem as well as improving the carbon footprint of the world!

What makes you, you? The contents of your breath??

A recent study has shown that the metabolites (basically, the chemicals present) in exhaled breath could be just as useful to medics as the chemicals found in urine and blood when diagnosing illness. Exhaling breath is a great method - it's non-invasive and gives instant results.

So why is this the case? Studies have shown that there is a precise type of bacteria which cause lung infections exhaled in the breath as well as those in the presence of stomach cancer!

Could this really be as effective as a fingerprint? Are the chemicals present in the population's breath really that varied? I'm not too sure, as from first-hand experience i'm sure we can all say that after we've drank a cup of coffee or eaten some garlic bread, the contents of our breath does noticeably change.

However a study was done where the breath of some volunteers was repeatedly taken over a week or so. Mass spectroscopy was used to analyse the samples. Obviously there were some compounds present in all samples such as carbon dioxide and water vapour, however compounds which appeared to be unique to each volunteer remained constant throughout the study. I guess this means that we might all have a unique composition of breath, right?

This is really an interesting idea and I hope that it really goes somewhere as I think it could really improve the efficacy of diagnostic methods.

Water of life!

One of the main reasons for bad health in third world countries is the lack of freshwater, making the need to purify water increasingly important.

Scientists from South Korea have been working on a method called capacitive deionisation to tackle this problem by desalinating water on a large scale. Capacitive deionisation uses an electric field as a sort of magnet to draw out the anions and cations present in water. You may be familiar with this method on a small scale, using electrodes. Capacitive deionisation is effectively the same method but on a much larger scale - scaling it up by increasing the flow of electrons in the system.

This idea holds great potential and although very simple I think it will be a breakthrough in tackling bad health in undeveloped countries, which really is great.